L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 (3 page)

But I was thinking harder and faster than I’d ever done in my life.

All right, you can read the
official
report somewhere else if you’re that type. And there’s a popularized version circulating Earthside I don’t even wanna
think
about.

But the plain and disgustingly simple truth is that the Yamaguchii or the Ganymedii—the “Freenies,” actually— whatever you wanna call ’em, every single last one of the little misbegotten sons, daughters, and fifteen other what-have-yous-of-bitches... thinks
I'm
his God.

It ail started innocently enough. But any mission which requires cooperating with the Spacers... well, I’d as lief spend a dirty weekend in Long Beach with a Marxo-Friedmanite Neo-Revisionist of the Old School.

Seems there was this splendidly normal main-sequence star, Yamaguchi 523 by the catalog, that suddenly went
kablomm!
one day. Only, by the time the news reached Luna, it’d happened several thousand years ago, light-waves being the notorious slow-pokes that they are.

Understandably, the telescope-johnies were mildly intrigued: if it could happen to a presumably well-behaved little hydrogen-bumer like Yamaguchi 523, why not, then— picking a star totally at random—to our very own dearly-beloved cosmic lightbulb, Sol?

Shucks, it’d make
every
day Ash Wednesday.

So they hawsered my precious
Georgie
up into a stinking Spacer’s hold, warping yours truly, plus assorted slide-rule types, out to this former stellar system, now a rapidly expanding sphere of slowly cooling incandescent gas.

Then it was my turn. I took us all backward to a thousand years before the dust-up. We settled in on a revoltingly decorated ball of mud which I figured was gonna be well-off vaporized. Whole place looked like something you’d rub the dog’s nose in and tell him t’do it on the paper next time.

The scientists scientized while I sat around counting rivets on the bulkheads, thinking wistfully about ordinary missions where I’d have the chance to savor local color— oughta see the way they dress the girls in ancient Crete! Sooner or later, I got bored enough to go out for a walk.
That’s
how I ran into the Freenies, although they weren’t in any condition to appreciate my godlike qualities then.

Y’see, they were
animals.

No kidding, they weren’t just primitives or savages. They didn’t use tools. They didn’t make fires. They didn’t even follow the sports pages. They just hung around, well, being
animals.

At the time, I thought (and never since) that they were kinda cute, in a stomach-turning sorta way. Same as they are now, of course: a foot-diameter hot-pink hemisphere, Ochskahrt knows how many wiggly little lime-green legs sticking out underneath, and this rubbery, wrinkled, turkey-neckish thing poking out the top, with a giant fly’s eye nesting in the end.

Anyway, I started playing around with them, lacking anything more constructive t’do, building little traps and labyrinths t’see how bright they were, what they could be trained to do. For once, I could interfere all I wanted to with local events. This place—and the Freenies—didn’t
have
any future history to screw up. Everything was scheduled to go up in subatomic particles at the stroke of the millennium.

Naturally, training required rewards. I tried all kindsa garbage, and it turned out they preferred percolator-leav-ings. Or old tea-bags. Even certain underhanded brands of artificially-processed orange-juice. In short, anything with caffeine in it. Hell, they even went for Midol.

Now it says here that caffeine measurably enhances human intelligence, and I believe it. Modem civilization’d be downright impossible without that first cup of coffee—what else could get a perfectly sane anthropoid up off his warm nest and out into the rat race every morning, day in and day out?

Notice that the “Age of Reason” didn’t get into full swing until the little brown beans started getting imported and that the First Industrial Revolution cranked itself into gear on an island where everything comes to a screeching halt for the afternoon cuppa.

Thus it was, Freenie-wise, as well. They were bright little critters, as animals go, just teetering on the edge of whatever separates us from horses and kangaroos, and those well-used tea-bags of mine shoved ’em right over.

Our mission called for skipping ahead a few decades at a time, taking observations until the onboard whiz-kids figured out what’d made the sun go boom.

I’m telling you, before we left that planet, the Freenies (named by me, if y’want the ugly truth, for the sound of their voices) had bootstrapped themselves through a couple Industrial Revolutions of their own, begun using atomic power, and practiced a religion with me, Bernard M-for-Moron Gruenblum, as its Entity-in-Chief.

I’ve thought about
hara-kiri,
but I get woozy from a paper cut.

The Freenies hadn’t
quite
invented starships, so after I made the mistake of opening my big fat face back at the Academy, we
rescued
’em: huge fleets of starships, time-buggies in their cargo holds, ferried millions of the critters off their doomed planet, first to Luna, later to a Yama-guchiformed Ganymede.

The Red Cross served doughnuts and coffee.

I wish it’d been Sanka.

Cuthbert shifted nervously in his chair.

Afraid he’d take to pacing again, I essayed quickly, “What does all this have t’do with the price of fish-meal, anyway?

What does the Yamaguchian legation
really
want?” Experimentally, I let another cigar ash fall. Sure enough, the mechanical mousoid got to it before it actually hit the carpet.

Cuthbert blinked but stayed planted on his fundament. “Why simply to send a group out with you on your next full-dress assignment.” He hesitated, and I began to get an awful feeling about what was coming. “It’s a religious experience for them, Bemie, sort of a pilgrimage.”

“A pilgrimage?” Yep, I’d figured right. Mentally, I started adding up my bank accounts, including the two in Switzerland and Hong Kong I didn’t
think
the Academy was wise to—in this business you can collect a lotta highly salable antiques if y’know what you’re doing.

“Why yes. As I’m sure you’re aware, the Yama— Freen-ies possess the capability, far from unique throughout the zoological realm, to transfer individual experiences genetically, and—”

“How many?"
I chomped my cigar, there being no bullet immediately available. His hands flopped on the desk like a midget hiding underneath had punched him in the groin. “Er...”

“Come off it, Cuthbert. We
both
know what I’m talking about: race memory. How many of the little...
darlings
do they wanna send with me, one of each sex?”

Considering the circumstances, you might say there was a pregnant pause. He looked at me almost apologetically, saying nothing. A highly eloquent nothing.

“I quit.”

Punch Number Two. He spluttered, muttered, blustered, an’ got flustered, all at the same time. Thought he was gonna have a hernia. “B-but Grandfa—Cap—Gruen—” “That’s
Bernie;
you’re forgettin’ yourself, Cuthbert. An’ there ain’t no way I’m gonna take
seventeen
of those creepy-crawlies along on a mission.
Nuts!
I’m only eighty-one years old; somewhere there’s a job for me in what’s left of the private sector: composing crossword puzzles; piloting a sanitation scow out in the Asteroids; my brother-in-law’s gotta frog-fur farm out on Betelgeuse IX he’s always wanted me to go halvsies on. I don’t
need
you, Cuthbert,
or
your Academy, an’ I sure as shootin’ don’t need the grief.” “B-but Bernie..

“I’m serious, Colonel.”

“B-but Bernie..

“You’re repeatin’ yourself, Cuthbert. Look, put
this
on your mirror an’ snort it: you can get yourself another boy. An’ the Freenies’re gonna hafta get themselves another Deity—God ain’t dead, he’s just resigned!”

I rose, zipped the top two inches of my coverall for emphasis, and woulda jammed my hat on my head as a final gesture if they’d been in style this century.

The door was halfway dilated before my Leader regained his composure. “How many, then,
Major
Gruenblum?”

It’s nice to be needed.
"Zero,
Cuthbert, an easy figure to remember, the ultimate Round Number—it’s how many of you people in Administration have any brains!”

I started through the door.

Look at it his way: every kid an’ all the telemedia in the Dominion may’ve thought the Freenies were cute as polka-dot suspenders; their rescue was the bieedin’ heart story of the century. But, way down deep, the Academy—an’ when you mention that institution, you’re talkin’ about all the government that counts in the Solar Dominion—the Academy was terrified by the little critters.

Think about it: a species which can pass on everything it’s learned to future generations just by breeding; which had risen from leaf-hopping to atomic energy in a short ten centuries; and which now was scarfing up everything it could about our star-traversing, time-traveling civilization?

Come t’cogitate on it, it scared me, too!

“Grandfather...” I’ll give this to Cuthbert; his gaze was suddenly cool and steady despite the sweat-beads crawling down his jowls in the fractional gravity, and I don’t think I’d heard him more direct and businesslike before or since. “The Yamaguchians simply want the experience of Being-With-God, the opportunity to transmit it into their hereditary record.
That's
why they require an individual of each gender—”

“Yeah. All seventeen of ’em, clutterin’ up my nice neat ship.” I sat down again. “Tell you what, Cuthbert. I’m t'eclin’ generous this momin’: promote me two more grades— so I’ll outrank
you
—let ’em pick out a
single
representative, an’ I'll take him-her-it anywhere an’ anywhen y’want. Bein’-With-God’ll work its way into their race memory eventually. It’ll just take longer, is all. An’ the lucky winner’ll have a lot more fun seein’ it gets done right.”

Cuthbert seemed to brighten noticeably. “Would you consider six, Bernie? Otherwise, the number of generations necessary, including fissionings and sporifications, to distribute data evenly among...”

I let him ramble for a while about genotypes, phenotypes, alleles, and “replicative verification densities.” You know, dirty talk. Who knows, this all might turn out to my advantage, wangled right.

“Since when you been such an expert on Freenie genetics, Cuthbert? I would a bet you took your advanced degree in polishing pants-seats.”

He grinned sheepishly, opened a desk drawer, and tossed over a small bottle. Crimped metal band around the top, plastic stopper with a puncture-mark in the center. I brushed a thumb across the cue-dot on the label:

“Genetics and Information TheorylYamaguchi 523: A Case-Study,
by Robert H. Anson, Ph.D., Copyright 2285, Random-LaRoche Pharmcopublishers, Lagrange II, Earth. Protected in all provinces and territories under the Solar Dominion; reproduction in any organism or device, without express permission, strictly—”

RNA extracts—our own artificial race-memory.

Hardly ever touch th’ stuff myself.

In the end, I didn’t take those three promotions. Once you outrank something like Cuthbert, what’ve y’got? Instead, I let myself get dickered up to three Freenies in exchange for a very special RNA extraction from a certain Don Juan de Tenorio of Seventeenth-century Seville, collected surreptitiously by one of our more conscientious female bus drivers.

Peeling a fresh cigar, I started to discard the plastic wrapper in the Colonel’s desk-disposal, then hesitated.

“Cuthbert, you know I’ve avoided gettin’ too acquainted with the Freenies ever since the rescue effort, but an un-settlin’ thought’s just occurred t’me..

I tied the wrapper in a single overhand knot, held it above my head, and let it drop. It floated toward the floor with a graceful, rotating motion.

“What if the Freenies, once they really get t’know me, decide I ain’t the kinda god they wanna be associated with? I mean, historically, deities get demoted pretty doggone violentlike!”

Spotting the wrapper, the housemouse dashed out from the baseboard—I
snatched
it from the air a foot before it hit the carpet—the little dickens ran around in confused circles, making noises like a teleprinter outa synch, bit the leg of my chair outa sheer frustration, and disappeared into the wall again. Probably never be the same.

All of a sudden, Cuthbert looked entirely too pleased, an’ I didn’t think it was because he’d come out ahead on our dealings. He steepled his fat fingers on his desk. “Well, Grandfather, just between you and me, I think people are greatly inclined to overlook
any
data which challenge their beliefs. Of course,
yours
may be the definitive case. I—”

“Yeah,” I interrupted before he could get to the insulting part, “an’ the Freenies’re
people,
right enough. I’m the one who
made
’em that way!”

Seemed like no time at all an’ I was in the lovin’ arms of my redheaded girlfriend over in Mare Fecunditatus.
Literally
no time, ’cause for some reason I couldn’t seem to recall finally leaving Cuthbert’s office or anything else in between.

But did it really matter? Somehow
we were in our private sunlit grove of trees at the edge of endless meadows, the breezes fresh as they stirred the knee-high grasses around us. We stood beneath a spreading, ancient oak, my beloved and 1, a songbird warbling in the leafy branches overhead. She leaned against the age-roughened bark, her warm, smooth hands in mine. I gazed deeply into her bottomless azure eyes.

The gentle wind caressed her pale blond hair. She smiled, shyly, glancing downward, dimples appearing magically in her satiny cheeks, lashes long and dark upon her milky skin. My heart began to pound, and I imagined I could see hers beating wildly as well in the breathtaking scallop of her sheer and lovely summer blouse. Her breasts were rounded and inviting. I bent to touch her, but she grinned, fumbling in an innocent, yet knowing way at the fastenings of my trousers.